In March 2004 a selection of politicians and geospatial industry stakeholders assembled at Parliament House in Canberra to mark the birth of something new – a Geocoded National Address File for Australia, or G-NAF. The processing methodology underpinning the G-NAF dataset was a world-leading technology capable of building a quality assured national address index from ten diverse data sources. In 2014, PSMA Australia is celebrating the 10th birthday of G-NAF. Within this brief ten years, PSMA’s G-NAF has evolved from an unknown quantity utilised only by its patrons, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and Australia Post; into a dataset utilised throughout the economy. Across government and industry, authoritative address data from G-NAF supports many policy and business systems providing important services to Australians - including emergency response, social services, insurance, telecommunications and navigation. In the 2013 strategy paper Advancing Australia as a Digital Economy, the Australian Government announced its intention to explore options for providing open access to G-NAF - making it freely available to all Australians. This was recognition of G-NAF’s fundamental place within the Australian digital economy and a sign of the growing acknowledgement that some flavours of national geospatial data are an essential digital infrastructure – an invisible and virtual parallel to our physical infrastructures such as the roads we drive on and the utilities that provide us with essential services.

PSMA Australia

PSMA Australia Limited is an unlisted public company owned by Australia’s federal, state and territory governments. Our goal is to facilitate broad and sustainable access to high-quality location data.